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Installing DualBoot - BackTrack and WinXP with 5 Primary Partitions

Hey everyone, I was browsing the current help/tutorial files here and none of them solved my problems, so I had to do it myself. I encountered a LOT of "Missing or Corrupt hal.dll", Black screen with blinking white cursor on the upper left hand corner with no error code and also an error when I loaded Back|Track from boot I got a GRUB prompt.

This guide below went through all the major Grub/Win/Dual errors with success. This guide will get ANYONE running Back|Track and XP with 5 partitions. Someone on this forum called 'Dude' said I cant have 5 partitions, BUT I DO and IT WORKS!

Another thing, this forum is in php and like most forums the layout of a text dump gets a rearranged structure and this guide is really LONG, but works and ITS VERY EASY [even though it took me 5 days to figure everything out you can do this is in a few hours]. I originally uploaded THE TUTORIAL on my gopher site because the computer I run at the moment finds modern software a real bitch and I have to use Lynx, bboard, com, pine and gopher as means of communication.

3 n00b Q's

Hi The_Denv

Thank you, this is probably exactly what I'm looking for! I have a full disk encryption program (drive crypt plus pack) for my C: and winXP. This has to be opened on boot in the MBR.

Anyway, I'm a total N00b and I did my best to follow your guide, and I didn't get it to work yet. There are some parts I have difficulties with, hopefully you will find the time to bring me some light.

Thank you, this is probably exactly what I'm looking for! I have a full disk encryption program (drive crypt plus pack) for my C: and winXP. This has to be opened on boot in the MBR...

Yeh man, I got your email and I modified my tutorial. Thanks for spotting the flaws in it. I didnt get someone else to overview and spellcheck/grammar check it plus I always enjoy a toke when Im on my computer so I do make a few mistakes now and again.

Anyway, cheers for spotting that out. The problem is now solved, fixed and re-published on the same URL as I primarily posted.

Good Luck!

EDIT: Sorry, I just looked at the date that you posted this. Sorry about the time I have been busy.

I'm hoping for a few tips along a similar line: I've already got a dual boot system with Win XP Pro & Ubuntu. I'm already using GRUB (it was installed by Ubuntu). I've got about 15GB unallocated on the end of my disk right now, that I'd like to use for a BT3B install. I have done a manual partition in VMWare to install BT3B, so I imagine this will be similar.

So, I'm thinking: the basic steps will be, create a new extended partition, toss an ext3 partition for the bt3b install and a swap partition in it.
In the VMWare tutorial, I used the built in installer to install BT3B. I can probably use the same method here, no?
Then I'll just need to edit the GRUB configuration file to point to the new BT3B installation, right?

And, similar to the tutorial here, I'll just need to add the lines:
timeout=4
title Slax
kernel /boot/vmlinuz max_loop=255 root=/dev/sdaX vga=791 rw